602-Steamfitters-Online

An unofficial discussion of matters concerning the members of Local 602

A DISCLAIMER REQUESTED BY THE BUSINESS MANAGER

"The views and opinions in this Blogspot are expressed by me in my capacity as an individual member and not in my capacity as a Union Officer. Likewise, comments by the other members on the Blogspot are individual expressions of their views. The views stated herein are not necessarily a reflection of Local 602. The Local has not seen or adopted my comments or the comments of others prior to posting. The Blogspot includes no expenditures of Union Funds."

Wednesday, July 27, 2016

A Warning Salvo

Again, we can not come to an agreement before our contract expires. I hope that if our current negotiations spills into a mediation that the judge understands that the MCA has tiptoed ever so gently about the legal charge of failure to bargain in good faith. The facts are what they are.most of our membership can not remember when we concluded a contract negotiations before the current contract expires.

Sunday, October 24, 2010

1) It is a 3-year contract. The MCA rejected our proposal for a 1-year contract. They insisted on a 3-year proposal. The middle ground is a 2-year contract. Good faith bargaining should have found this middle ground before we received this proposal.

2) Minimum contract language changes were agreed upon. We got tangled up over wage rates and stopped negotiating over necessary issues. A number of issues proposed by our Brothers and Sisters were cast aside early in negotiations. Chief among those is time and a half pay for our wage and benefit package. If we accept this contract we can not revisit this issue until 2013. As we struggle to meet future funding levels for our pension and medical benefits this issue will haunt us.

3) The MCA wanted arbitration. The body rejected arbitration. The Local Union does not need to surrender their right to collectively bargaining and neither does the MCA. Why would either side admit that they are so inept that they can not find further common ground? We have agreed to a 1st year wage rate. What prevented us from agreeing to a 2nd and if necessary, a 3rd year wage rate? It is time for the MCA to stop pouting about the 2007 negotiations. My advice to both sides is simple, put this proposal away and settle the wage differences. Man up and agree that we can reach a reasonable and equitable solution for the remaining years.

4) Arbitration means that strangers will settle our contract. Those that would argue that the IRC is a jury of our peers ignore several major points. The Union and contractor representatives on the IRC don’t live or shop in our metropolitan area. Our cost of living is different than theirs. We are a Union of Steamfitters. Their world is one where the plumbers and fitters are combined. Further, none of them pay the servicemen the same rate as the plumber or fitter. They pay their servicemen at a lower rate. Our servicemen will be taking a huge step backwards to a bygone era.

5) June 1st deadline for arbitration is an artificial date that only benefits the MCA. This is an open invite for the MCA to drag their feet as they did this year. I have not found anyone who can tell me when we ever concluded negotiations two months prior to the end of a contract. This unrealistic date is a guarantee that the next two years will be settled through arbitration. Go to our Union website and look where we were on June 29, 2010. It will shock you how far apart we were at that time. Worse yet it allows the contractors to cause dissension in our Union just prior to our elections on June 6, 2011 and June 4, 2012. If there were a complete turnover of our full time officers in 2012, we would have rookies leading us into arbitration. Think about it. Don’t be naïve and think that they would not turn their heads and let a dissident group do their dirty work on company time. It has happened in the past. It is happening right now.

Saturday, October 16, 2010

I have spent this evening trying desperately to understand the Union members that would sit in judgement if we go to arbitration under the IRC. There is only so much that you can find out about them and their Local Unions on the Internet. Only one of the four had locals with public web pages that gave me any insight. In search of secondary resources on the web, the picture of our potential judges doesn’t fill me with any confidence that we would be judged by a jury of our peers. None of their locals compare well to ours. They are either plumbers’ unions or combined locals that have split scales. Servicemen suffer under their “organizations”. At best, they suckle on a hind teat.

Our history includes a period when there was a Steamfitters Local Union 602 and a Local Union 602A. We were once a split Union with separate officers and separate pay scales. Local Union 602 A represented the servicemen. They were limited in their overtime pay to time and a half when the other half received double time. They were also paid at a lower pay scale.

Our nonsense ended in the 50’s at an International Convention when the Canadian Unions protested the seating of the delegation from Washington D.C. The Canadians objected to the fact that no representatives from the service side were present. When the gavel came down to settle their protest we were made whole. From that day forward there was only one Union in Washington, D.C., Steamfitters Local Union 602, which was charged with fully representing construction, service, and metal tradesmen. Thank God for the Canadians.

The fact that the practice of split Unions and split scales continues to exist in our industry is a problem that the UA must grapple with. If they had followed our lead and insisted that their locals developed their service industry as we have, our International would be a greater presence in the market.

We are unique in more than one way from all of the Local Unions whose experience and traditions could cloud their judgements on our contract. In most instances all of us would likely argue that there must be “apples and apples” compared. Hell, at this late date, some of us would accept “apples and oranges”. However, “Apples and Orangutans” is unacceptable. I will vote against any contract that contains this particular from of arbitration.

Friday, October 15, 2010

Let’s not kid ourselves. Selecting June 1st as the deadline for instigating arbitration is not accidental; neither is it incidental or lacking of political consequence. The UA Constitution obligates us to hold our General Election of Officers once every three years. Our Union elections are presently scheduled for the first Monday in June. We have a National Convention Delegate election scheduled for Monday, June 6, 2011. We have a General Election of Officers scheduled for Monday, June 4, 2012.

I shot a flare into the air about the MCA 2009 Strategic Plan in a blog post on May 27, 2009. I believed then that the contractors were sneaking into the back door of our 2009 election with ill intent. This is what was posted then on the MCA website:

B. Through management’s legal counsel, we will clarify "management rights" during negotiations and union elections:

1. What can we communicate to workers during contract ratifications? 2. Can contractors give incentives to union employees to encourage them to vote in an election?3. What can contractors do to encourage participation in union elections?

C. During 2008 –2009… At the end of the June 2009 election, suggest that the newly elected officers of 602 go to dinner with the 2009 Board of Directors and invite Local 5 officers to attend.

By the way, your officers were never invited to sit down and break bread. Maybe the MCA didn’t get what they wanted in 2009. However, to their credit, they have kept on target and now have the CAUSE to achieve their desired AFFECT. Maybe they will get what they want in 2011 and 2012. What would be more pleasing for their side than to have a new set of officers elected to pull together our case for arbitration? Green, unseasoned, how good of an arbitration case could they make?

Mark my words. There is little incentive for the contractors to reach an agreement with our Local Union prior to June 1st. When have they ever done that in the past?

Brothers and Sisters if you accept the proposed contract you will likely surrender your right to ratify a contract in year two and year three. Further you will politicize our negotiations beyond anything we ever found acceptable in the past. And further you could assist in presenting the weakest arguments in front of the arbitrators.

This is a train wreck in the making and you have your hand on the switch-gear. I suggest that you might want to put this proposal on a sidetrack.

Tuesday, October 12, 2010

My recent blog and Facebook posts have been applauded by some and called into question by others. I am embarrassed by both sentiments because they are based on the wish that my views should agree with those of the reader.

My goal over the past several months has been to cause those that would read my posts to consider a subject of controversy, our stalled negotiations, in a critical manner. I hoped to provoke further debate and cause a change in course through dissent and political agitation.

I have stated from the first offer of a 10% paycut to the last offer that the contractors’ proposals were ridiculous. By the use of the word I signaled that their offers were to be the subject of ridicule. I employed words, essays, songs, and political cartoons to make that point over and over again. I am satisfied with my endeavor.

For those that believe that I or any member that posted should have been more restrained I would suggest that you review your American history. Quiet diplomacy rarely has succeeded in causing change in our country.

“If there is no struggle, there is no progress. Those who profess to favor freedom, and deprecate agitation, are men who want crops without plowing up the ground, they want rain without thunder and lightning.” Frederick Douglass (Abolitionist, Lecturer, Author and Slave 1817-1895)

To the contrary, our political and social progress has always been propelled by political essays, editorials, cartoons, satire, song and direct action. Our freedom was not secured, our slaves were not freed, and a myriad of social causes were not achieved through polite political discourse.

“If there is no struggle, there is no progress. Those who profess to favor freedom, and deprecate agitation, are men who want crops without plowing up the ground, they want rain without thunder and lightning.” Frederick Douglass (American Abolitionist, Lecturer, Author and Slave 1817-1895)

Both sides moved forward tonight. A tentative agreement was reached and a strike was averted. The members of the Union must still ratify the terms of the agreement. There is still much to be debated.

Sunday, October 10, 2010

We have worked for nearly 10 weeks at last year’s wages. A just and fair settlement has to take retroactive pay under consideration. As this point is debated we need to make clear to our members that negotiations have been interrupted twice for weeks at a time at the request of the MCA. On one of those occasions, the request was made so one of the negotiators could go to Hawaii for several weeks to check on his properties.

We have members that are barely able to maintain rent payments or make their mortgage payments on the only home that they may ever own. I personally will have a difficult time asking any member of Local 602 to ratify a final agreement that does not include retroactive pay.

Saturday, October 9, 2010

In an earlier post I thanked the individual members of the MCA negotiating team for radicalizing the current generation of Steamfitters. They have one more opportunity to change their course but I fear that they won’t. They seem hell bent on making the same mistake that the MCA did when I was a much younger man.

We have not had a strike since 1975. Thirty-five years is a long time. Those of us that were directly affected by the strike vowed to never forget the strike and the impact that it had on our lives. We have not. We are now in the process of teaching our younger members what we learned back then.

I sympathize with the members who are confused and frightened about the prospect of a looming strike. Many of them have not experienced hard times by any traditional measure of the term. Some have never been out of work since they joined the Union.

Pay raises have come to be expected as a natural consequence of just showing up day in and day out. The Union took care of the rest year by year. That is exactly what we thought back in 1975.

Let the first lesson learned in this conflict be that there are no guarantees in life inside or outside of the Union. We are all challenged spiritually and financially when unforeseen complications enter our life. We should always be prepared for the future, but few ever are. We did not expect the 1975 strike. We were caught off guard when negotiations took the wierd turn that it did this year.

I was a first year apprentice working for Carrier in 1975. My salary was better than what I had been paid as a public school teacher but I was still living pay check by pay check. I had no savings. I was unprepared to pay a portion of my salary into a strike fund. That was no one’s fault by my own. I was raised better than that.

My father was a Local 602 Steamfitter. He and my mom raised seven kids. My parents didn’t have credit cards. In fact there was no credit of any kind for construction workers. They had to pay cash for food, clothing, and shelter. The closest thing to credit was “lay away”. You could buy something by placing a down payment and making monthly payments. You got to take home what you had purchased only after making all of the payments.

They taught us all well but we soon forgot the lesson. The one-dollar an hour payment into the strike fund taxed me. It was probably 20% of my salary as a first year apprentice. But I survived and so can you.

No matter what transpires this week let’s go forward with a commitment from this encounter with reality. There are no guarantees in life. We need a strike fund inside of our Union. We need another personal strike or emergency fund outside of our Union.